Hosted by the Norwegian Seafood Council [1] who has its headquarters in the city known as Paris of the North, Torskefiskkonferansen 2018 was held in Tromsø, Norway, on Thursday, 18 Oct. 2018 at Clarion Hotel, The Edge. An important annual event for the cod fish industry sector of Norway, this year’s working theme for the conference was “Torskefisk (Cod Fish) goes global!”. The purpose of the event was to provide a platform for the industry as well as academics to exchange knowledge and views on the continued development of the Norwegian cod fish industry and its position in global markets.

The 28th annual RESER (European Association for REsearch on SERvices) conference took place this year from 20 to 22 Sep. in Gothenburg, Sweden. We had a total of 87 registered participants with some colleagues flying in from as far as China and Japan. This year, the conference was jointly hosted by The School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg (HGU), and Chalmers University of Technology.

The RESER conferences of 2010 and 2018 are special for me because the events seem to nicely bracket my career at HGU. My role at HGU spanned between executive management and research, where I began by being part of the RESER 2010 conference organizing and scientific committee. I find it surreal that organizing RESER 2018 and meeting with RESER colleagues is also one of the last memories that I bring with me about the Business School before moving on to join Nofima, the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research as Market Scientist at the Centre for Marketing Research located at its headquarters in Tromsø, Norway.

The annual 9th International Research Meeting in Business and Management (IRMBAM-2018) was held from 5 to 7 of July in the beautiful French Riviera city of Nice. The conference was jointly organized by an international coalition of the IPAG Business School of France, South Champagne Business School of France, the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, Canada, the University of Bern of Switzerland, and University of Nice Sophia Antipolis of France. The conference had 15 tracks covering a broad range of topics in economics, management and international business. Notable keynote speakers to this year’s conference in the field of management and entrepreneurship include, Professor David Allen from Neeley School of Business at the Texas Christian University located in Forth Worth, Texas, USA, and Professor Shaker Zahra from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USA.

Global food demand is expected to rise by 35% by 2030 [1]. The demand in increased food supplies will need to come in the form of increased crop yields and/or a reduction in food waste. In view of keeping ecological balance with global nutrition needs in the upcoming deacades, there’s a general agreement that a transition from animal to plant-based protein supply is desirable [2-4], even if there is acknowledgement that the efficiency of the global food production system should not only be assessed as a function of the area of cultivated land but also in accordance to the amount of nutrients withdrawn and replaced from the soil [5].

Launched in Jan. 2015, the Global Production Networks Centre at the National University of Singapore (NUS) is home to a new research initiative that studies the role of global production networks (GPNs) in the development of Asia. Due to the comprehensive and complex nature of GPN studies, the centre hosts scholars from various cognate disciplines, some of which include sociology, economics, international business, human-economic geography and social psychology in view of cultivating an integral perspective to the GPN field of study. Rather than a more traditional double-blind peer review system to the submission of conference papers, the purpose of the Conference on Global Production (CGP) 2017, held between 6-8 Dec., was to facilitate network sessions and exchange of ideas of like minded individuals interested in GPN and global value chain (GVC) research.

Doctoral degree disputation events are special because it is not everyday that one comes around in the proximate circle of your closest colleagues. On 25 Oct. 2017, Emily Xu, who is a member of faculty at the Centre for International Business Studies (CIBS) at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled, The Internet of Things: Projects – Places – Policies. Her dissertation publication is timely, considering the progressive interconnectivity enabled by digital infrastructure and technologies. Her main argument is that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm shift in terms of machine intelligence, its knowledge production and interaction occuring with little or no human intervention. Digital intelligence are their own agents in producing, storing and transferring knowledge. These events and activities call for a myriad of human knowledge in order to manage the situation, from product to policy, it seems sometimes that humanity is both at the forefront of knowledge creation whilst trying to ‘catch the tail of the Dragon’ at the same time. A seeming contradiction that some might not wish to see solved by an unsuspected and imposed Singularity by artificial inteligence.

On 6 Jan. 2014, The Economist ran a print edition special report on cultural centres and “The Bilbao effect” [2]. Referring to findings of a McKinsey study, the central observation and argument made is that a vibrant cultural sector, alongisde green spaces and people of diverse backgrounds and nationalities are core elements for the success of any city.

The opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (GMB), Basque Country, Spain in 1997 stands as prime illustration of how a museum commissioned by a city’s mayor can help transform citylife and living. GMB had as ambition, to attract 400,000 art visitors in the first year of its opening. This number would have enabled them to return total investment in a reasonably short timeframe and deliver income to the city and Basque Country economy [3]. GMB attracted 1 million visitors in its first year of opening. Within the first three years of GMB’s opening, the museum raised over 100m Euro in taxes for the regional government, an amount that more than covered the construction costs. GMB contiues to draw about a million visitors annually, even if its exhibitions remain modest. This observed success of the GMB had a cascading effect on other cities looking to revitalise their economies where over the next decade witnessed the mushrooming of cultural centres in various cities from Brazil, to China and Saudi Arabia [2]. Over the next decade more than two dozen new cultural centres focused on museums are due to be built in various countries, at an estimated cost of $250 billion, according to a study by AEA Consulting, a New York firm that specialises in cultural projects. The Guggenheim “Bilbao effect” as discourse theme was picked up by the news media and reflected in different scholastic and practitioner circles [8-13].

The theme for this year’s 27th RESER conference on service research is the crucial role of services in business and cities competitiveness. The conference was held between 7 to 9 September 2017 at the Euskalduna Conference Centre, hosted in collaboration with Mondragon Univeristy of the Mondragon Corporation in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The core theme was structured around 7 topics: city service, servitization, service ecosystems, service innovation and international perspectives, value creation and methodological challenges in service studies. A core value of RESER conferences, that could also be observed in this context, is to encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and interaction of scholars across disciplines in order to address complexity. It is always this element of the plurality of perspectives that I enjoy most when meeting with the RESER community of practitioners and scholars. There were 104 listed participants for presentation over three parallel sessions. Four social events were scheduled, one per day beginning 6 September with the doctoral colloquium meet and concluding with an interesting tour of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The conference days pendulumed between rain and sunshine. On the evening of the gala dinner however, conference participants were treated to a spectacular 360 degrees view of the city of Bilbao from Torre Iberdrola, located on the 24th floor of the Iberdrola Tower. RESER 2018 is set to be held from 20-22 September 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The 11th international workshop of the Groupe d’Études Management & Langage (GEM&L) was held on 4 to 5 July 2017 at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. 34 papers were presented at the workshop that ran in three parallel sessions. About 50 participants attended the conference with international representation from Australia, Canada, Colombia, India, Europe, Singapore, South Korea and the USA. The theme addressed this year was Revisiting multilingualism at work: New perspectives in language-sensitive research in international business. Pursuing a continued and parallel interest on research methodology from EURAM 2017 that took place just over a week ago in Glasgow, Scotland, to GEM&L 2017, I followed papers presented that addressed new directions in research in international business (IB) studies at this international workshop.

The conferences organized by the European Academy of Management (EURAM) are generally well anticipated and draw a large number of international submissions for presentations. This year’s 21.24 Jun. EURAM 2017 conference held at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, was no exception. The key to navigating EURAM conferences in general is strategy in following focused individual research specific interests or complementary topics that might help broaden the perspective to one’s own research interests. EURAM 2017 had 13 strategic interest groups (SIG) of which this year, I chose to focus attention on SIG 12, on Research Methods and Research Practice (RM&RP).